Our House is on Fire
MALENA & BEATA ERNMAN, SVANTE & GRETA THUNBERG
(ALLEN LANE, 288 PP, £16.99)
Tablet bookshop price £15.29 • Tel 020 7799 4064

We got a diesel car. They said diesel was better for the planet. Now it turns out it isn’t. Did we get a new car? No. I’m the kind of person who drives the Thunberg-Ernman family to weeping, swearing and book-writing. They’d rather have Trump.

“Everyone complains about his alternative facts, but we’re probably even worse than he is, because we fool ourselves that we’re doing good things for the environment ... Everyone is a climate-change denier.”

That’s Greta on politicians. Sweden, so long the place we’d have to invent if it didn’t exist, just to make us all feel better, comes off very badly. “We’ve got one of the biggest ecological footprints in the world per capita,” she says. “We’ve exported our emissions … no one talks about it.”